New ideas for sustainability – a team effort

Together with their teams, top managers at Henkel develop different initiatives for implementing Henkel’s new sustainability strategy – and record them in an action plan. This approach generates a common understanding among the team members and engages all employees in the development of concrete projects.

Establishing a clear strategy is just the beginning – the challenge is to implement it globally. Sustainability can only become an integral part of daily activities if all employees understand the underlying principles and have an opportunity to make their own contributions.

To begin the implementation of Henkel’s new Sustainability Strategy 2030, some 3,000 team leaders around the world were requested to discuss the new strategy with their teams and to draw up a sustainability action plan for their own particular sphere of activity, one that precisely reflects the opportunities and challenges they see in their business. This is how we ensure that the strategy will be translated into concrete projects in every business sector, every function, and every region.

One of the first team meetings to set up an action plan for sustainability was held in Paris, France, in October 2011. “Our discussion centered around the question of ‘What are we doing well today and what could we do better tomorrow?’,” said Joachim Bolz, President of Henkel France, describing the way he and his management team had addressed the topic. Looking at each of the six focal areas, he and his colleagues considered how each one of them could deliver more value in the future while reducing their ecological footprint at the same time. At the end of the meeting, the participants committed to concrete measures that they could implement in the short term, as well as longer-term initiatives that would contribute to achieving Henkel’s sustainability goals for 2030.

Sustainability Strategy 2030 action plan meeting: Joachim Bolz (fourth from left), President of Henkel France, discusses the implementation of the new sustainability strategy with his management team and Henkel experts.